A Webcomic about board games. Updates every Friday

We will call it … this land!

We will call it … this land!

11000

We will call it … this land!

Saying ‘making comics is easy’ is not at all true, but for comparative purposes, please allow the indiscretion and bear with me.

Making comics is easy. It’s the promotion part where I really fall down, and, sadly, the promotion part is just as important as the making part. I love writing Tiny Wooden Pieces, and I love connecting to other people and getting to talk to them about board games. If I was better at promoting the site, it would follow that we could reach more people, share our experience with more people, and get more people involved in our conversation. I’ve just never been good at self-promotion. It might be an Irish thing, but my genes can only take part of the blame. Social media is free and easy and leaves no room for excuses, and no place to hide when the blame comes to town.

I was talking to a work colleague during the week, only to discover that she had no idea I made a webcomic. I have worked with her for the entire time we have been making TWP, which is more than a year now. I don’t work in a sprawling, multi-floored cubicle farm with hundreds of fellow drones. I have fewer than 10 work mates. On my part, this illustrates just how bad I am at promoting the comic. For her own part though, my colleague demonstrated a response to discovering the comic that I am not exaggerating in describing as perfect. The next time I worked with her, which was only two days later, she had read through the entire archives, and purchased a copy of Love Letter. She is not someone who plays board games (excepting a dubious interest in Monopoly.) To say she not only read and enjoyed the comic, but started playing games because of it, was so gratifying. This is why we make Tiny Wooden Pieces. Because we want everyone to love board games as much as we do. We want to share our hobby, talk about it, laugh about it. We want to bring cardboard, dice and a sense of humour to the table. Knowing that the comic has this effect on just one person, or even a small percentage of our readers helps inspire the work.

I have faith that if we keep making a comic that people like, we can grow one small step at a time. That’s how I rationalise not doing more to promote the site 🙂

David

How is there not a dinosaur miniatures game? I mean there is one figure in HeroScape but any other?

Aaron Gannaway

There is at least one dinosaur game that I know of: Pirates vs Dinosaurs (https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/73472/pirates-vs-dinosaurs). I was seriously considering purchasing it for a while, but it just never made it above other games. In particular, Robinson Crusoe. I debated between the two in my head for a while and went with Robinson Crusoe. I still haven’t played Pirates vs Dinosaurs, but I can say Robinson Crusoe is a phenomenal game.

David

There are quite a few dinosaur games – Evo for example and recently Apex. I was looking for one with more tactile components – my BGG avatar features the dinos from Lost Valley of the Dinosaurs which are fun but cheesy. Now I think about it there’s another – Dinosaurs of the Lost World but it had standees. I had a Jurassic Park game too but I can’t remember if it had actual dinos in it…plus it probably wasn’t very good.

Emily

I’m sure I’d be just as bad. I’m terrible at telling people things so I’d probably have been working on something for five years before discovering I hadn’t told any of my workmates (and half of my friends too). Of course I have no creative skills so I’ll never have to worry about promoting anything I’ve done to anyone 🙂
I have done the little I can to help you (ie. sharing your facebook page with my friends). So not massively helpful.

Sharing it on FB is more that we could ask from anyone! That’s showing us great support, and I thank you for it.

Wesley

I found this via someone sharing one of the netrunner comics…
Word of mouth, it’s powerful!

Oh, and I want to weigh in: Caverna is probably better for you than Agricola, looking at just the comics. In Agricola, it can be impossible to attempt to do the same style as someone else, which is fine, but then the game penalizes you for not having a well-rounded farm, which isn’t as fine. In Caverna, you are more easily able to do whatever you wish and try to build the best cave-farm you can, with less worry that someone else placed a worker and screwed you out of 10 points, as it’s usually pretty easy to pick a different end-game goal than someone else.